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  ORBÁN

  PAUL LENDVAI

  Orbán

  Europe’s New Strongman

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  Copyright © Paul Lendvai 2016

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available Paul Lendvai

  Orbán: Europe’s New Strongman

  ISBN: 9780190911591

  CONTENTS

  Preface

  1.The Personal Touch

  2.The Long Climb from Bottom to Top

  3.The Rise and Fall of a Shooting Star

  4.The Road to the First Victory

  5.The Young Comet

  6.The Gravedigger of the Left

  7.A Mega-Scandal: Gyurcsány’s ‘Lie Speech’

  8.Orbán’s Victory in the Cold Civil War

  9.The Earthquake

  10.The New Conquest

  11.The End of the Separation of Powers

  12.The National Liberation Struggle

  13.A Questionable Election Victory

  14.The Price of ‘Orbánisation’

  15.Power, Greed and Corruption

  16.The Great and Good of the Court

  17.Hungary’s ‘Führer Democracy’

  18.‘The Most Dangerous Man in the EU’

  19.The End of the Regime Cannot Be Foreseen

  Notes

  Index

  PREFACE

  This book deals with the history of Hungary since the collapse of the Communist system and above all with developments since the conquest of power in 2010 by Viktor Orbán and his Fidesz party. My main intention in this work, which was first published in German in 2016, was to provide a truthful and dispassionate account of Viktor Orbán’s stunning career, even of politics and actions which I deplore.

  Still in his early fifties, Orbán, the ablest and most controversial politician in modern Hungarian history, has not only shaped events in Hungary, but has also played a major role in European politics. He was the youngest prime minister in Europe in 1998–2002, and since his two overwhelming electoral victories in 2010 and 2014 he has ruled Hungary as the undisputed Number One.

  I was born and brought up in Budapest, and as a child and a young man I was both directly and indirectly affected by the demons of nationalism and ethnic hatred. After my flight to Vienna following the crushing of the 1956 October Revolution, I worked as a foreign correspondent (with twenty-two years on the Financial Times) and as a political writer and television commentator. My books on Austria, the Balkans, Hungary and Eastern Europe have tried to present a balanced picture, avoiding partisanship toward any particular nation or cause.

  As a Hungarian-born Austrian author with Jewish parents and a Hungarian wife, now living in Vienna but travelling and lecturing frequently around the world, I have always tried to avoid sweeping generalisations. I have neither assets nor interests in my native homeland and my undivided loyalty is to Austria, which since 1957 has given me—like hundreds of thousands of other refugees from many countries—the chance to start a new life in freedom.

  In view of numerous important events, I have added a comprehensive new final chapter to the translation of the German text. Following my frequent trips to Hungary both before and after 2010, the insights offered here into the often turbulent history of a country of extraordinary contradictions have been formulated neither with cynical indifference nor with partiality toward any particular group. The book is based on documents, as well as on personal impressions and conversations with politicians, scholars and many friends in Hungary and abroad.

  I must thank above all my wife, Zsóka, who, despite her engagement with Nischen Verlag publishing German translations of contemporary Hungarian literature, has done her best to provide ideal working conditions for my writing this book.

  Vienna, June 2017

  1

  THE PERSONAL TOUCH

  How important are people and personalities in politics? In the democratic states, the political and economic crises that have afflicted the world since the banking collapse of 2008, the consequences of international terrorism and cross-border migration, are reflected both in a great critical unease about parliamentary debate and in opinion polls expressing a passionate longing for a ‘strongman’. The human factor remains difficult to comprehend, even incalculable, yet without it all historic events are incomplete. All too often not only in global history, but also in the contemporary history of Central and Eastern Europe, conflicts between progressive and reactionary forces, between openness and isolation, have been bound up with almost dramatic changes in the personalities of political leaders.

  The maxim that ‘men make history’ originates with the notions of hero worship expressed by the once very popular Scottish historian Thomas Carlyle: ‘The history of the world is but a biography of great men.’ According to the German philosopher Georg Friedrich Wilhelm Hegel, however, the spirit of the world and of the age is much more decisive than either people or personalities. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels believed that politics is dependent on the material conditions of production. The question of which forces have moved a leading politician and which forces he himself has set into motion—that is, the combination of external factors and personal action—still constitutes the central problem in describing and evaluating political personalities today.

  If chroniclers of contemporary history wish to consider the important role of the personal element in political decision-making, which should never be underestimated, then they need only recall the words of the Swiss historian Herbert Lüthy: ‘Contemporary history is not anonymous. It is known to us as something that really occurs only to the extent to which we wrest anonymity from the actors as well as we individualise and identify them … Dates and facts mean absolutely nothing when we are unable to create for ourselves any image whatsoever of the consciousness of the acting players.’1 In the age of the global communications revolution and the dissemination of social media, such reflections have become even more pertinent.

  The turbulent history of the Central and East European states, and the perplexing changes in the positions of the men and women at the head of their governments and states, confirm time and again the warnings of Isaiah Berlin, the great British thinker born in Riga, who in 1988—that is, before the great political upheavals of the following year—cautioned that history should not be seen as an ‘autobahn from which major deviations cannot occur … I believe in pluralism and do not believe in historical determinism. At crucial moments, at turning points … chance, individuals
and their decisions and acts, themselves not necessarily predictable—indeed, seldom so—can determine the course of history … We haven’t much choice. Let us say one per cent. But that one per cent can make all the difference.’

  In discussion with the Iranian philosopher Ramin Jahanbegloo, Berlin explored some historical counterfactuals, taking Churchill in 1940 and Lenin in April 1917 as examples. What would have happened if Churchill had not become prime minister or if Lenin had died earlier?2 This train of thought, of course, could easily be continued. What would have happened if, on 10 March 1985, not Mikhail Gorbachev but another of his less progressive rivals had been elected General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union? Or if, in 1947–8, Josip Broz Tito, with all his experience and authority, had not stood at the helm of communist Yugoslavia and openly refused to take orders from Stalin? Even the metamorphosis of János Kádár, from being despised throughout the world as the pitiless ‘Gauleiter of Moscow’ following the bloody crushing of the autumn 1956 Hungarian uprising to his becoming the symbol of ‘goulash communism with petty freedoms’, illustrates the importance of the personality.

  In his 1989 essay ‘The Heroes of the Withdrawal’, the German writer Hans Magnus Enzensberger ironically described the achievements of Kádár and Gorbachev, as well as the Polish head of state General Wojziech Jaruzelski, as those of ‘demolition contractors’ in the dismantling of their own systems. But an equally valid assessment of these and many other personalities is Hegel’s verdict that, when the historical moment is past, when the heroes have completed the task they had to fulfil, then history throws them away ‘like empty shells’. This ultimately is what happened to such contrasting figures as Chancellor Konrad Adenauer, the founding father of the Federal Republic of Germany, or Willy Brandt, the architect of the German Ostpolitik, and, on the other side of the Iron Curtain, the geriatric Hungarian party boss Kádár, who in declining health and after a series of mishaps was toppled with the agreement of Gorbachev. The careers of some leading politicians reflect what Jakob Burckhardt called ‘relative greatness’ in his famous Reflections on History; they also confirm that talk of a political personality’s indispensability can very quickly turn out to be hollow.

  Sometimes, however, history not only drives seemingly indispensable leaders from office but also throws onto the rubbish heap the governing parties they head. In Hungary, the land of the greatest popular uprising in post-war Europe, that was the fate of the three political groupings most important first in setting the course of the 1989 annus mirabilis’ great political changes, and then, with the exception of four years of Fidesz government (1998–2002), in decisively moulding the nation’s post-1989 politics and economy. In contrast to the other countries of the Soviet bloc, the system change in Hungary was not associated with either a political upheaval or a dramatic revolution. Among the Hungarian people at that time, unlike during the few days when the 1956 uprising appeared successful, there was no feeling of moral renewal or any intense desire to settle scores with the dignitaries of the old regime. Not one leading communist functionary or head of the various secret services was ever convicted of a single crime.3

  In contrast to the violent clashes and mass protests elsewhere in the Soviet empire, the relationship in Hungary between those in power and the opposition was marked on both sides by self-restraint and a willingness to engage in a dialogue. Given the indelible memory of the hopes and tragedy of the 1956 revolution crushed by the Soviet tanks, the state party’s monopoly on power was never questioned. All sides strove, right until the end, for a gradual reform, and then later for an orderly change of power. The right-wing radicals of today, but also the left-wing critics of the smooth transition to parliamentary democracy, easily forget that in 1989 there were still approximately 70,000 Soviet soldiers, 1,000 tanks, 1,500 armoured military vehicles, 622 artillery pieces and 196 missile battery sites provisionally (until the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact in 1991) stationed in Hungary, and that the party controlled not only the intact and immense apparatus of the secret services but also the units of the so-called armed workers’ militias.

  When considering the long and tortuous path of János Kádár (1912–89) from executioner and jailer to the ‘father of the nation’ and the ‘good king’ during the thirty-two years of the regime inseparably linked with his name, we must in retrospect emphasise the immense political significance of his personality; and this in full knowledge of his evil role (behind the scenes, but long since fully documented) in the execution of his former comrades in arms, László Rajk (1949) and Imre Nagy (1958). The typewriter mechanic and lifelong full-time functionary always differed in his public appearances from the other leading communist politicians. This was something I was able to experience at first hand in an extended interview with Kádár in 1981.

  On account of his almost puritanical lifestyle, his personal modesty and sense of humour, Kádár, despite the bloody settling of scores with the freedom fighters and the inner- and intra-party opposition, had by the 1970s and 1980s managed to achieve a benevolent toleration of the regime by the broad mass of the population. The esteemed national poet Gyula Illyés said in a TV interview with me in the spring of 1982 that Kádár had succeeded in gaining the trust of the people through ‘objectivity, modesty and accomplishments’. In contrast to all the other leaders in the Eastern Bloc, Kádár did not tolerate a personality cult built around himself. No pictures of him were to be found hanging in official offices and buildings, and even at ceremonial parades none were carried. He was ‘a dictator without personal dictatorial tendencies’, as a Hungarian political scientist aptly noted.

  Despite the historical responsibility that weighs heavily upon Kádár, all opinion polls taken since 1989 have revealed that the betrayer and murderer of Imre Nagy, the prime minister of the revolution who morphed from a Muscovite communist into a national statesman, is remembered as the jovial father of the nation and as the ‘hallmark of a golden era’. At the end of the 1990s, 42 per cent of those questioned considered Kádár the ‘most congenial Hungarian politician of the twentieth century’.

  This glorification of the Kádár regime may of course in part be explained as a consequence of his shrewd tactical policy of carrot and stick, which bore considerable fruit relatively quickly. It is statistically incontrovertible that incomes tripled in real terms between 1956 and 1989. And it may also have been in part a reaction to the huge new problems that arose after 1989.

  As a foreign correspondent and later as editor-in-chief of the East European desk of the Austrian broadcaster, ORF, my double role as a reporter and, thanks to my local and linguistic knowledge as a native Hungarian, as an insider, allowed me to observe the process of half-hearted change in Hungary. Until he was stripped of power in May 1988, Kádár was thought to be indispensable for a peaceful change and, at the same time, the embodiment of the staying power of a ‘strongman’ put in place by the Kremlin. Kádár was, indeed, a strong man. Over three decades, as he tacked between the pressures from Moscow and the deeply rooted fears of his people, he neutralised potential rivals with subtlety, cynicism and, if necessary, with brutality, but always with inimitable tactical skill. The ambivalence of the judgements passed on this communist regime in the service of an alien dictatorship—and also on the authoritarian Horthy regime, the last ally of the Third Reich and responsible for the deaths of 560,000 Hungarian Jews—provides the key for an understanding of the tendency, so marked in Hungary, of seeking refuge in the past.

  The reckoning with the three basic taboos (the one-party system, foreign rule and the stigmatisation of the 1956 uprising as a counter-revolution) took place at a monumental funeral service in front of 250,000 people at Heroes’ Square in Budapest on 16 June 1989. This was before the formal resignation of the ruling party and before the withdrawal of the Soviet occupying troops. Purely for its location at the entrance to the City Park and at the end of Andrássy Avenue (at almost 3 kilometres, the longest street in Budapest), this square of the co
llective national memory works magnificently. At its heart stands the 36-metre-high column that was erected in 1896 to mark the thousandth-year anniversary of the Magyar conquest of the territory of Hungary. Atop the column is a 5-metre-high figure of the archangel Gabriel, who holds in one hand the Hungarian crown and in the other the apostolic double cross. The monument to Hungarian heroes, and the semicircular colonnades and statues dedicated to the memory of the fourteen kings and heroes of Hungary, dominate the scene. Two buildings dating from the years before the turn of the century and designed in the neoclassical style of the late nineteenth century, the Palace of Arts to the right and the Museum of Fine Arts to the left, complete the architectural unity of Heroes’ Square.

  The black velvet catafalque towered over the six Corinthian columns draped with black flags. Above, on the steps, lay the five coffins containing the remains of the martyrs who had been sentenced to death in a secret trial and then immediately executed thirty-one years previously: Prime Minister Imre Nagy and his four companions of fate. The sixth coffin had been left empty, to symbolise the 300 executed freedom fighters of the uprising in October and November 1956. Over the unforgettable scene hung an air of mourning. But there was also a menacing determination never to give up the freedoms now being gained. The entire demonstration was broadcast live on Hungarian TV, as was the subsequent interment of Imre Nagy and his comrades in plot 301 of the same cemetery where they had previously been buried in unmarked mass graves. As a compromise, the guard of honour for the coffins was formed not only by family and friends of the martyrs and members of the democratic opposition, but also by those functionaries of the ruling party who had adapted themselves in a timely fashion to the new political situation. Austrian TV, like many others, transmitted the moving pictures. I did not report live from Budapest but commented off-camera in the studios in Vienna. My voice at times almost failed, faltering with emotion and excitement, and tears rolled down my cheeks during the funeral oration given by my friend Miklós Vásárhelyi, who as Imre Nagy’s chief press officer had been responsible in 1953 for obtaining my release from an internment camp.